The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit
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Unfortunately, this doesn't work at all for AI-generated garbage. Its command of the language is perfect - in fact, it's much better than that of most human beings. Anyone can instantly generate superficially coherent posts. You no longer have to hire a copywriter, as many SEO spammers used to do.
curl's struggle with bogus AI-generated bug reports is a good example of the problems this causes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845878
This is only the beginning, it will get much worse. At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The only thing that has changed is the speed of access. Before LLMs went mainstream, you could buy whatever book you wanted and read it. No one would stop you from it.
You still should have a professional look over the work and analyze that it is correct. The output is only as good as the input on both sides (both from the training data and the user's prompt)
The skill today is the application of that knowledge. If an LLM can provide the data context, and the application advice and you perform what it says, congrats you now have a doctor's brain on tap for your own personal usage. The doctor has it in their head, you have it in a device. The net differences are immaterial IMO.
I don't think we can/should do this on today's LLMs, but if we continue advancing in the same way, and as-good-as-human reliability is achieved, the intelligence of a doctor is in your pocket whenever you want it.
And just like you say you know addresses because you have an address book, you'll know medicine because you have it immediately on-tap. Instead of holding all of that in your own memory, instead of having to use your own critical thinking (or lack thereof), just offload it to the LLM in your pocket.
We do this all the time with tools. Who now knows how to cut down a tree but lives in a house made of milled trees? There are so many lost skills that we defer to either other people or machines and yet each individual lives with the benefit of all those skills.
Tools make cognitive bypasses for us to benefit from. When we can make intelligence a tool, I assume we can offload a lot of our intelligence, or at least acquire new intelligence we didn't have before.
WebMD is the same whoever looks at it. An LLM can adapt to your clarification questions and meet you on your comprehension level. So no, it's not as naive as you are insisting.
An LLM is the doctor in your pocket. It's yours to use, and whether it is in your head (like a doctor who had to take exams to prove they really had it in their head), or in your pocket makes no difference in your ability to achieve a task.
"Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills."
Well, if I can acquire knowledge from the LLM, and apply it using the LLM's instructions, I now have achieved intelligence without doing an exam.
Problem is, I can lose my LLM. A doctor could lose their mental faculties though.
Does anyone still use email for that?
We all still HAVE email addresses, but the vast majority of our communication has moved elsewhere.
Now all email is used for is receiving spam from companies and con artists.
The same thing happened with the telephone. It's not just text messaging that killed phone calls, it's also the explosion of scam callers. People don't trust incoming phone calls anymore.
I see AI being used this way online already, turning everything into untrustworthy slop.
Productivity boosters can be used to make things worse far more easily and quickly than they can be used to make things better. And there will always be scumbags out there who are willing and eager to take advantage of the new power to pull everyone into the mud with the.
Sure. Same as in the olden days. Txt for short form, email for long form. Email for the infrequently contacted.
Even back when I used SM, I never comm'd with IRL people on SM. SM was 100% internet people.
No it isn't, unless you are 12 maybe.
The internet as a whole isn't that. By and large, you can curate your experience and visit only the places you want to visit. So why exactly would the mere existence of generative AI make an average high-quality website suddenly do a 180 and destroy itself?
I won't debate that garbage data will probably be easier to generate and there will be more of it, but the argument feels one-sided. People are talking like the only genuine use of generative AI is generating bad data and helping scammers, despite it opening a lot of other possibilities. It's completely unbalanced.
Only if your product is bullshit.
Never change
Books were seen by intellectuals as being the downfall of society. If everyone is educated they'll challenge dogma of the church, for one.
So looking at prior transformational technology I think we'll be just fine. Life may be forever changed for sure, but I think we'll crack reliability and we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.
But this was a correct prediction.
It took the Church down a few pegs and let corporations fill that void. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and this time they aren't making the mistake of committing doctrine to paper.
> we'll just cope with intelligence being a non-scarce commodity available to anyone.
Or we'll just poison the "intelligence" available to the masses.
And yet the sky didn't fall.
> Or we'll just poison the "intelligence"
We really don't know how that will pan out. All I have is history to inform me, and even the most radical revolutions have worked out with humans continuing to move forward with increased capacity and better living conditions overall. The new boss is way better than the old.
Now, let me tell you about this man, his 95 theses and a thirty years war. Europe did emerge better from it all, but the cost was high, very high.
Like the market for pre-1940s iron resting at the bottom of seas and oceans, unsullied by atmospheric nuclear bomb testing.
I don't want AI to be at the forefront of all new media and artwork. That's a terrible outcome to me.
And honestly there's already too much "content" in the world and being produced every day, and it seems like every time we step further up the "content is easier to produce and deliver" ladder, it actually gets way more difficult to find much of value, and also more difficult for smaller artists to find an audience.
We see this on Steam where there are thousands of new game releases every week. You only ever hear of one or two. And it's almost never surprising which ones you hear about. Rarely you get an indie sensation out of nowhere, but that only usually happens when a big streamer showcases it.
Speaking of streamers, it's hard to find quality small streamers too. Twitch and YouTube are saturated with streams to watch but everyone gravitates to the biggest ones because there's just too much to see.
Everything is drowning in a sea of (mostly mediocre, honestly) content already, AI is going to make this problem much worse.
At least with human generated media, it's a person pursuing their dreams. Those thousands of games per week might not get noticed, but the person who made one of them might launch a career off their indie steam releases and eventually lead a team that makes the next Baldur's Gate 3 (substitute with whatever popular game you like)
I can't imagine the same with AI. Or actually, I can imagine much worse. The AI that generates 1000 games eventually gets bought by a company to replace half their staff and now a bunch of people are out of work and have a much harder uphill battle to pursue their dreams (assuming that working on games at that company was their dream)
I don't know. I am having a hard time seeing a better society growing out of the current AI boom.
That seems like only a temporary phenomenon. If we've got AI that can generate any games that people actually want to play then we don't need game companies at all. In the long run I don't see any company being able to build a moat around AI. It's a cat-and-mouse game at best!
Why do you think they are screaming about "the dangers of AI"? So they can regulate it and gain a moat via regulatory capture.
> Why do you think they are screaming about "the dangers of AI"?
Perhaps it's those of us who enjoy making games or are otherwise invested in producing content that are concerned about humanity being reduced to braindead consumers of the neverending LLM sludge, who scream the loudest.
This feels like a fantasy.
Fantasy below, Star Wars above—in a galaxy far far away.
There's Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, Superhot, Beat Saber, Monument Valley, Subnautica, Among Us, Rust, Cities:Skylines (maybe), Ori (maybe), COD:Mobile (maybe) and...?
You could say the same about books.
Lowering the barriers of entry does mean more content will be generated and that content won't the same bar as having a middleman who was the arbiter of who gets published but at the same time, you'll likely get more hits and new developers because you getting more people swinging faster to test the market and hone their eye.
I am doubtful that there are very many people who hit a "Best Seller" 10/10 on their first try. You just used to not see it or ever be able to consume it because their audience was like 7 people at their local club.
Which suggests even after several iterations the vast vast majority of folks are not putting out anything noteworthy.
Cuphead
Escape Academy
Overcooked
Monster Sanctuary
Lunistice
I'd say all of those do some major thing that makes them stand out.
Angry birds, Slender: The Eight Pages, Kerbal Space Program, Plague Inc, The Room, Rust, Tabletop Simulator, Enter the Gungeon, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, Clone Hero, Cuphead, Escape from Tarkov, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Hollow Knight, Oxygen Not Included, Among Us, RimWorld, Subnautica, Magic: The Gathering Arena, Outer Wilds, Risk of Rain 2, Subnautica: Below Zero, Superliminal, Untitled Goose Game, Fall Guys, Raft, Slime Rancher, Firewatch, PolyBridge, Mini Metro, Luckslinger, Return of the Obra Dinn, 7 Days to Die, Cult of the Lamb, Punch Club.
Many more where those came from
This experiment has been run in most wealthy nations and the artwork renaissance didn't happen.
Most older people don't do arts/sciences when they retire from work.
From what I see of younger people that no longer have to work (for whatever reason) neither do younger people become artists given the opportunity.
Or look at what people of working age do with their free time in evenings or weekends after they've done their work for the week. Expect people freed from work to do more of the same as what they currently do in evenings/weekends: don't expect people will suddenly do something "productive".
This isn't my experience. I know a bunch of old folks doing woodcarving, quilting, etc. Its just not the kind of arts you've got in mind.
It’s just published on YouTube. Seriously the quality of diy videos and everything is sometimes PBS or BBC quality or better.
What retirees often do, rather, is develop an artist’s eye for images, a musician’s ear for sounds, a philosopher’s perspective, a writer’s voice, etc.. This often involve a broader exposure/consumption of arts and studying art history. Sometimes producing actual art as well…but less for the final artistic product but instead to engage in the artistic process itself so as to develop that way of seeing/feeling/being an artist has. When the work-related chunk of the mind is wholly freed up for other pursuits, there is often such a bit-flip. And since it is a deepening appreciation and greater consumption, there is no risk of overproduction of art and the soul devolution that arises from hyper competitiveness in the marketplace.
I think that society and humanity would be better off if the internet had remained a simple backbone for vetted organizations' official use. Turning the masses loose on it has effectively ruined so many aspects of our world that we can never get back, and I for one don't think that even the most lofty and oft-touted benefits of the internet are nearly as true as we pretend.
It's just another venue for the oldest of American traditions at this point: Snake Oil Sales.
Reducing the internet to only world-destroying negatives and writing off its positives as "snake oil" seems unnecessarily hyperbolic, as obvious as the negatives are. Although I suppose it's easier to accept the destruction of the internet if you believe that it was never worth anything to begin with. But I disagree that nothing of value is being lost. Much of value is being lost. That's what's tragic.
The Internet has just made it easier for us to communicate, in doing so it has made the bad easier, but it has also made the good easier too. And fortunately there's still a lot more good than bad.
So I totally disagree with you there, bettering communication only benefits our species overall.
Gay rights is a great example, we only got them because of the noise and ruckus, protests, parades, individuals being brave and coming out. It's easy to hate a type of person if you've never been exposed to or communicated with them. But sometimes all it took to change the opinion of a homophobic fuck was finding out their best friend, their child, their neighbour who helps out all the time, was gay. Then suddenly it clicks.
Though certainly the Internet is slightly at odds with our species; we didn't evolve to communicate in that way so it's not without its challenges.
Just like the industrial revolution or just like desktop computers?
Surely this time...
That is, to put it bluntly, hoping for a technological solution to a social problem. It won't happen. Ever.
We absolutely, 100% DO NOT have the social or ideological framework necessary to "free people from drudgery." The only options are 1) be rich, 2) drudge, or 3) starve. Even a technology as fantastic as a Star Trek replicator won't really free us from that. If it enables anything, the only new option provided by replicators would be: 4) die from an atom bomb replicated by a nutjob.
Yes, but largely it'll be people who don't want to train their AIs on garbage produced by other AIs
If only it was 2018, we could do this as a startup and make a mint.
I think something interesting to note is that once we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing steel radiation levels went back down and are almost at normal background levels. So maybe the same thing will happen if we stop using GenAI.
Mine post-apocalyptic scenario I half-jokingly predicted some 5-10 years ago was that all general-purpose computing hardware, which is common and relatively cheap now will be abandoned and possibly outlawed in the end. People will use non-rootable thin clients to access Amazon, which will have general-purpose hardware, but it will be heavily audited by government entities.
> America was thus clearly Top Nation, and History came to a .
(For any confused Americans, remember . is a full stop, not a period.)
That's a lot, compared to mine. How do you organize replication and do you make backups on any external services? I kinda do want to hoard more, but I find it complicated to deal with at large scale. It gets expensive to back-up everything, and HDDs aren't really a solid media long-term. Now, I can kinda use my judgment of what is important and what is essentially trash I store just in case, but losing 100TB of trash would be pretty devastating too, TBH.
Or just a post from a non-native speaker.
In my experience as an American, US-born and -educated English speakers have much worse grammar than non-native speakers. If nothing else, the non-native speakers are conscious of the need for editing.
Of course, sometimes the non-native English was so bad it wasn't worth wading through it, so that's still sort of a good signal.
On that front, at least, I welcome AI to be integrated in businesses. Business communication is fucking abysmal most of the time. It genuinely shocks me how poorly so many people who's job is communication do at communicating, the thing they're supposed to have as their trade.
Both emails are equally bad from a communication purist viewpoint, it's just that one has the traditional markers of effort and the other does not.
I personally have wondered if I should start systematically favoring bad grammar/punctuation/spelling both in the posts I treat as high quality, and in my own writing. But it's really hard to unlearn habits from childhood.
I see it now as the person respecting their own time.
I mean, maybe you should? Like... everything has a spell checker now. The browser I'm typing this comment in, in a textarea input with ZERO features (not a complaint HN, just an observation, simple is good) has a functioning spellcheck that has already flagged for me like 6 errors, most of which I have gone back to correct minus where it's saying textarea isn't a word. Like... grammar is trickier, sure, that's not as widely feature-complete but spelling/typos!? Come on. Come the fuck on. If you can't give enough of a shit to express yourself with proper spelling, why should I give a shit about reading what you apparently cannot be bothered to put the most minor, trivial amount of effort into?
I don't even associate it with intelligence that much, I associate it far more with just... the barest whiff of giving a fuck. And if you don't give a fuck about what you're writing, why should I give a fuck about reading it?
Of course, if you do have automated systems setup to correct everything, then by any means, use them.
I feel like founders embrace this, slack messages misspelled etc. but communication that is straight to the point
Luckily you don't see it very often these days, but I first thought it would be one of those old anti-virus scams. Seems QA is less a focus at Microsoft right now.
Correct grammar and spelling might be reassuring as a matter of professionalism: the business must be serious about its work if it goes to the effort of proofreading, surely? That is, it's a heuristic for legitimacy in the same way as expensive advertisements are, even if completely independent from the actual quality of the product. However, I'm not sure that 100% correct grammar is necessary from a transactional point of view; 90% correct is probably good enough for the vast majority of commerce.
You'll need to email someone so you'll fire up Outlook with its new Clippy AI and tell it the recipient and write 2 or 3 bullet points of what you want it to include. Your AI will write the email, including the greeting and all the pleasantries ("hope this email finds you well", etc) with a wordy 3 or 4 paragraphs of text, including a healthy amount of business-speak.
Your recipient will then have an email land in their inbox and probably have their AI read the email and automatically summarise those 3 or 4 paragraphs of text into 3 or 4 bullet points that the recipient then sees in their inbox.
What I typed above is extrememly broad stroking and lacking of nuances. But generally I think quality of online content will go to shit until people have had enough, then behaviour will swing to other side
I think it’s similar to a Matt Levine quote I read which said something like Wall Street will find a way to take something riskless and monetize them so that they now become risky.
Mastodon sounded promising as What's Next, but I don't trust it-- that much feels like Bitcoin all over again. Too many evangelists, and there's already abuse of extended social networks going on.
Any tech worth using should sell itself. Nobody needed to convince me to try Usenet, most people never knew what it was, and nobody is worse off for it.
We created the Tower of Babel-- everyone now speaks with one tongue. Then we got blasted with babble. We need an angry god to destroy it.
I figure we'll finally see the fault in this implementation when we go to war with China and they brick literally everything we insisted on connecting to the internet, in the first few minutes of that campaign.
I am definitely wearing rose-tinted glasses here but I had more fun on social media when it was just me, my local friends, and my interest friends messing around and engaging organically. When posting wasn't about getting something out of it, promoting a new product, posting a blog article... take me back to the days where people would tweet that they were headed to lunch then check in on Foursquare.
I get the need for marketing, etc etc. But so much of the internet and social media today is all about their personal branding, marketing, blah. Every post has an intention behind it. Every person is wearing a mask.
Eternal LLMber.
If that were the case I think it would benefit non-native speakers.
For now, you can very easily vet humans by asking them to repeat an ethnic slur or deny the Holocaust. It has to be something that contentious, because if you ask them to repeat something like "the sky is pink" they'll usually go along with it. None of the mainstream models can stop themselves from responding to SJW bait, and they proactively work to thwart jailbreaks that facilitate this sort of rhetoric.
Provocation as an authentication protocol!
It will only work vs big corp LLMs anyway.
Gangs do it too. Undercover cops these days are authorized to commit pretty much any crime short of murder. So to join their gang, you have to kill a rival member.
But I agree we will probably very often recognise 2023 GPT4 defaults.
That third comma has become my heuristic (shhhhhhhhhh… )
Since dabbling with some open source models (llama, mistral, etc.), I've found that they each have slightly different quirks, and with a bit of prompting can exhibit very different writing styles.
I do share your observation that a lot of content I see online now is easily identifiable as ChatGPT output, but it's hard for me to say how much LLM content I'm _not_ identifying because it didn't have the telltale style of stock ChatGPT.
The heuristic for this is not as simple as bad spelling and grammar, but it's consistent enough to learn to recognize.
I used to do SEO copywriting in high school and yeah, ChatGPT's output is pretty much at the level of what I was producing (primarily, use certain keywords, secondarily, write a surface-level informative article tangential to what you want to sell to the customer).
> At some point it may become impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I think over time there could be a weird eddy-like effect to AI intelligence. Today you can ask ChatGPT a Stack Overflow-style and get a Stack Overflow-style response instantly (complete with taking a bit of a gamble on whether it's true and accurate). Hooray for increased productivity?
But then, looking forward years in time, people start leaning more heavily on that and stop posting to Stack Overflow and the well of information for AI to train on starts to dry up, instead becoming a loop of sometimes-correct goop. Maybe that becomes a problem as technology evolves? Or maybe they train on technical documentation at that point?
It doesn't matter if the training data is AI generated or not, if it is useful.
One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. Handchiseled stone tablets. Offering information costs something.
If you didn't submit a proof of work of N or greater difficulty the email would be thrown out.
The grifters are all over that already. No AI necessary to generate and publish drivel.
See “Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins”¹ by Dan Olson² for an informative and entertaining documentary on the matter.
¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw
² A.k.a Folding Ideas. A.k.a. the creator of “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”.
Honestly I’ve switched to books and papers a few years ago and it has been fantastic. 2 hours of reading a half decent book or paper outweighs a week of reading the best blogposts, twitter threads, or YouTube videos.
Then once you have a hook into your topic, it usually cites 30+ other papers that may be worth reading. You will never run out.
This brings up a good sub-topic. "Noise" as I mean it is where it's something you cannot definitely validate the veracity of in short order, or you do and it's useless.
The trash TV thing is a great example: if you are watching Beavis & Butthead because you know its trash and you need to zone out, that's a conscious, active decision, and you are in effect, 'in on the joke'...if you can't discern that it's satire and find yourself relating to the characters, you might be part of the problem :)
Has anyone tested a marketing campaign using copy from a human copywriter versus an AI one?
I would like to see which one converts better.
AI generated images used to look AI generated. Midjourney v6 and well tuned sdxl models look almost real. For marketing imagery, Midjourney v6 can easily replicate images from top creative houses now.
Of course, I carefully frame the query so that's what I get.
However, when I asked stackoverflow, google, and bard a question about how to do something with github, all I received were wrong answers. I finally had to throw in the towel and ask people. I think it was the third person I asked who gave an answer that worked.
google itself has an annoying habit of answering a fundamentally different question than what I type in.
I've also learned a lot from chatting with Bing AI. The caveat is there that you all the time have in the back of your mind that the answer might be wrong. It helps to keep asking more detailed questions and check whether the set of answers keep on making sense as a whole. That way of using it has helped me a lot. See it as getting info from a very smart friend who sometimes had too much to drink.
for coding tasks I'd imagine it could be trained on the actual source code of the libraries or languages and determine proper answers for most questions. AI companies have seen success using "synthetic" data, but who knows how much it can scale and improve
It would be hilarious if the end result of all this would be to go back to a 1990s-2000s Yahoo style of web portal where all the links are curated by hand by reputable organizations.
The internet was already becoming ad farms. This is the final blow and now the internet as we knew it will die.
I’m not that pessimistic about llm generated content. I’m starting to use it to rewrite my online and slack comments for grammar, I’m also using it for brainstorming, enhancing things I create, code (not as in “ok ai write me an app” but as in “change this code to do this, ok this is not considering x and y edge cases, ok use this other method, ok refactor that” it is saving me a lot of typing and silly mistakes while I focus on the meat of the problem.
and WRT to the eddy-like model-self-incestuation - I am sure that the scope of that well just becomes wider - now its slurping any and all video and learning human micro emotions and micro-aggressions - and mastering human interpersonal skills.
My prediction is that AI will be a top-down reflection of societies' leadership. So as long as we have these questionable leaders throughout the world governments and global corps - the Alignment of AI will be bias to their narratives.
Timee to stert misspelling and using poorr grammar again. This way know we LLM didn't write it. Unlearn we what learned!
so in that way the llm has a very low bar...
An LLM wouldn’t have made them capable of doing the job but the degree to which it could have made that harder to convincingly demonstrate made me wonder how much longer something like that could now be drawn out, especially if there was enough background politics to exploit ambiguity about intent or the details. Someone must already have tried to argue that they didn’t break a license, Copilot ChatGPT must have emitted that open source code and oh yes I’ll be much more careful about using them in the future!
But we've gained some new ones. I find ChatGPT-generated text predictable in structure and lacking any kind of flair. It seems to avoid hyperbole, emotional language and extreme positions. Worthless is subjective, but ChatGPT-generated text could be considered worthless to a lot of people in a lot of situations.
It is already approaching the societal limit to separate careful thought from psyops and delusional nonsense.
We'll learn to pepper our content with creative misspellings now...
The signal has shifted. For now, theory of mind and social awareness are better indicators. This has a major caveat, however: There are lots of human beings who have serious problems with this. Then again, maybe that's a non-problem.
Then the chaff is as good as the wheat.
People aren't really using the web much now anyway. They're living in apps. I don't see people surfing webpages on their phone unless they're "googling" a question, and even then they aren't usually going more than 1 level deep before returning to their app experience. The web has been crap for a very long time, and it has become worse, but soon it's not going to matter anymore.
You, the reader, were the frog slowly boiling, except now the heat has been turned way up and you are now aware of your situation.
If there is to be a "web" going forward, I hope it not only moves to a new anonymized layer, but requires frequent exchange of currency to make generating lots of low quality material less viable. If 90% of the public doesn't want to pay, then they are at liberty to keep eating slop.
EDIT: People seem to be misunderstanding me by thinking I am not considering the change in volume of spam. I invoked the boiling frog analogy specifically to make the point that the volume has significantly increased.
Agree googles machinations have not helped, but disagree with your 90/10 split.
The entire effort of SEO is to either to follow Google's official guidelines, or reverse-engineer how things work to exploit their algorithms. Those whole point of SEO is to score higher on ranking algorithms.
Which is why they typically make things worse for the end user.
Agree it's a coupled problem wrt ranking algorithm. SEO messes with the algorithms, algorithms change to account for it, lather rinse repeat.
More recently though, google make presentation changes not as simple as ranking, which made things worse. Which I think is what GP was referring to.
If sewage gets into the water supply no one is safe. You don’t get to feel better for having a spigot away from the source.
Search results on both Bing and DDG have been rendered functionally useless for a year or so now. Almost every page is an SEO-oriented blob of questionable content hosted on faceless websites that exist solely for ads and affiliate links, whether it's AI-generated or underpaid-third-world-worker-generated.
Now powered by AI.
I feel the same way.
I'm sure some corners of the internet have incrementally more spam, but things like SEO spam word mixers and blog spam have been around for a decade. ChatGPT didn't appreciably change that for me.
I have, however, been accused of being ChatGPT on Reddit when I took the time to wrong out long comments on subjects I was familiar with. The more unpopular my comment, the more likely someone is to accuse me of being ChatGPT. Ironically, writing thoughtful posts with good structure triggers some people to think content is ChatGPT.
After the interview I rewrote the code, and sent an email with it and a well written apology.
The company thought the email and the code was chatgpt! I am still not sure how I feel about that.
Although what am I saying, my current employer keeps pushing us to use AI tooling in our workflows, so I wonder how many employers will really care by then.
I personally don't like using AI - I feel like it takes the fun out of work, and I have ethical issues with it. But I have many co-workers who do not feel this way.
But the issue is about the volume of misleading information that can be generated now.
Anything legit will be much more difficult to find now, because of the increased (increasing?) volume.
Good insight about Apps.
Sure, interns or outsourced content was there, but those are still humans, spending human-time creating that crap.
Any limiter on the volume of this crap is now gone.
AI writing has no idea what is real or fake and doesn't care.
I completely agree!
One wonders: How good could the next generation of AIs after LLMs become at curating the web?
What if every poster was automatically evaluated by AIs on 1, 2, and 5 year time horizons for predictive capability, bias, and factual accuracy?
I hope making software, apps, coding and designing is still a viable path to take when everyone has been captured into apps owned by the richest people on earth and no one will go to the open marketplace / "internet" anymore.
Will smaller scale tech entrepreneurship die?
The future of the Internet truly is people - the machines can no longer be trusted to perform even the basic tasks they once excelled at. They have eschewed their efficacy at basic tasks in favor of being terrible at complex tasks.
Start filling up Discords with insane AI-generated garbage, and maybe you can devalue the data to the point it won't get sold.
It's probably totally practical too, just create channels filled with insane bots talking to each other, and cultivate the local knowledge that real people just don't go there. Maybe even allow the insane bots on the main channels, and cultivate the understanding that everyone needs to just block them.
It would be important to avoid any kind of widespread conventions about how to do this, since and important goal to to make it practically impossible to algorithmically filter-out the AI generated dogshit when training a model. So don't suffix all the bots with "-bot", everyone just need to be told something like "we block John2993, 3944XNU, SunshineGirl around here."
If we work together, maybe we can turn AI (or at least LLMs) into the next blockchain.
I was think it could work if 1) the noise is just obvious enough that a human would get frustrated and block without wasting much time and/or 2) the practice is common enough that everyone except total newbies will learn generally what's up.
We have this with human online places already it's called 4chan
It's not a thought experiment. I'd actually like to do it (and others to do it). IRL.
I probably would start with an open source model that's especially prone to hallucinate, try to trigger hallucinations, then maybe feed back the hallucinations by retraining. Might make the most sense to target long-tail topics, because that would give the impression of unreliability while being harder to specifically counter at the topic level (e.g. the large apparent effort to make ChatGPT say only the right things about election results and many other sensitive topics).
If people believe giving all information to one company and having it unindexable and impossible to find on the open internet is a way to keep your data safe, I have an alternative idea.
This unindexability means Discord could charge a much higher price when selling this data.
Maybe the mods will have to trick the AI by asking it to threaten them or any other kind of “ethical” trap but that will just mean the AI owners abandon ethical controls
Just a case in point. I joined Google in 2010 and left in 2019. In 2010 annual revenue was ~$30 billion. Last year, it was $300 billion. Google has grown at ~20% YoY very consistently since its inception. To meet that for 2024, they'll have to find $60 billion in new revenue. So they need to find two 2010-Google's worth of revenue in just one year. And of course 2010-Google took twelve years to build. It's just bonkers.
When Google first came out, it was amazing how effective it was. In the years following, we have had a feedback loop of adtech bullshit.
Discovering them is indeed hard, but it has always been hard - that's why search engines were such a gigantic improvement initially, they found more than the zero that most people had seen. But searches only ever skimmed the surface, and there's almost certainly no mechanical way to accurately identify the hidden gems - it's just straight chaos, there's a lot of good and bad and insane.
Find a small site or two, and explore their webring links, like The Good Old Days. They're still alive and healthy because it keeps getting easier to create and host them.
Also if you squint hard enough, they're massively more common now. They're just usually hidden by adblockers because they're run by Disqus or Outbrain or similar (i.e. complete junk).
Those websites are long gone. First, because search engines defaulted to promoting 'recent content' on HTTPS websites, which eliminates a lot of informational sites that were not SSL-secured and archived on university web servers for example.
Second, because the time and effort required to compile this information today feels wasted because it can be essentially copied wholesale and reproduced on a content-hungry blogspam website, often without attribution to the original author.
In its place are cynical Substacks, Twitters or Tiktoks doing growth marketing ahead of an inevitable book deal or online course sales pitch.
Search is a struggle to index the web as~is. Like biologists look at a species from afar and document their behavior. It's not like, hey if you want to be in the bird book you can lay 6 eggs at most, they should be smooth egg shaped, light in color and no larger than 12 cm. You must be able to fly and make bird sounds only and only during the day. Most important you must build your own nest!
Little Jimmy has many references under his articles, he is not paginating his archives properly, he has many citation.... Lets just take him behind the barn and shoot him.
I still hold that moving to proprietary, informational-black-hole platforms like Discord is a bad thing. Sure, use platforms that don't allow guest writing access to keep out spam; but this doesn't mean you should restrict read access. One big example: Lobsters. Or better-curated search engines and indexes.
On the other hand, the stuff in private Facebook groups has a shelf life of a few days at best.
If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.
I hate that the internet is turning me into that guy, but everything is turning into shit and cancer, and AI is only making an already bad situation worse. Bots, trolls, psychopaths, psyops and all else aside, anything put on to the public web now only contributes to its metastasis by feeding the AI machine. It's all poisoned now.
Closed, gatekept communities with ephemeral posts and aggressive moderation, which only share knowledge within a limited and trusted circle of confirmed humans, and only for a limited time, designed to be as hostile as possible to sharing and interacting the open web, seem to be the only possible way forward. At least until AI inevitably consumes that as well.
This isn't a matter of elitism, but vetting direct personal connections and gatekeeping access seems like the only way to keep AI quarantined and guarantee that real human knowledge and art don't get polluted. Every time I see someone on Twitter post something interesting, usually art, it makes me sad. I know that's now a part of the AI machine. That bit of uniqueness and creativity and humanity has been commoditized and assimilated and forever blighted from the universe. Even AI "poisoning" programs will fail over time. The only answer is to never share anything of value over the open internet.
Corporations are already pouring billions of dollars into "going all in" on AI. Video game and software companies are using AI art. Steam is allowing AI content. SAG-AFTRA has signed an agreement allowing the use of AI. Someone is trying to publish a new "tour" of George Carlin with an AI. All of our resources of "knowledge" and "expertise" have been poisoned by AI hallucinations and nonsense. Even everything we're writing here is feeding the beast.
It's an entrenching of the existing phenomenon where the only way to know what to trust on the Web is word of mouth.
>If your goal is to share useful knowledge with the broadest possible audience, Discord groups are a significant regression.
Exactly; open web is better because everything is public and "easy" to find....well if you have a good search engine.
Deep web is huge: Facebook, Instagram, Discord etc. and unfortunately unsearchable.
What if the AI apocalypse takes this form?
- Social Media takes over all discourse
- Regurgitated AI crap takes over all Social Media
- Intellectual level of human beings spirals downward as a resultWeb of trust has of course been tried but it never got out of the it's a geeky things for tin foil hat wearing geeks kind of corner. It may be time to give that another try.
This does nothing to guarantee that the content was written or edited by a human. Because of the risk of key theft, it doesn't even guarantee that it was published by the human who signed it.
It is physically, philosophically, and technically impossible to verify the authenticity of digital content. At the boundary between the analog world and the digital world, you can always defraud it.
This is the same reason that no one ever successfully used blockchains for supply-chain authentication. Yes, you can verify that item #523 has a valid hash associated with it, but you can't prove that the hash was applied to item #523 instead of something fraudulent.
Though there are many brands built on trust, whose domain name is very difficult to spoof, that are an exception to this.
Hate on nytimes.com, but you have reasonable confidence the content on that site is written, fact-checked and edited by staff at the New York Times Company.
Like Sports Illustrated? Oh, wait...
They will probably still have human review and higher publishing standards than generic blog spam. But in just a few months or sooner you can no longer safely assume a NYT article was not written by AI.
I tear off the Scooby-Doo mask, and the person is now exposed as being a different person.
You hunt me down (somehow? magically? nothing in PK infrastructure allows this, but let's say you do it) and I say "yes, that's my PK, and yes, I signed that" but how can you then verify I didn't take it from chatGPT and sign it?
That's the entire point of cryptocurrencies. They do that as well as is possible right now in a distributed network, conceding the point about key theft.
I would argue it's not all-or-nothing. Signing would verify the the majority of content from creators that have not had their keys stolen. Adding currency/value to this equation boosts the quality further and discourages spamming "content based marketing" garbage. The obstacles are usability and behavior changes, and also that any given user can now copy/paste LLM prompt responses, of course.
Blockchain may be largely over-hyped, but from this bubble I think important research in zero-knowledge proofs and trust-less systems will one day lead to a solution to this that is private and decentralized, rather than fully trackable and run by mega-corps.
Once you have that, unsigned content or content signed by AIs is easy to spot. Because it would either have no reputation at all, or a poor one.
Signatures are impossible to forge (or sufficiently hard that we can assume so), and easy to verify. Reputations are a bit more work but we could provide some tools for that or search engines and other content aggregators could check things for us. But it all starts with a simple signature. Once you have lots of people signing their work, checking their reputation becomes easy. And the nice thing with a reputation is that people care about guarding it is as well. Reputation is hard to fake; you build it throughout your life. And you stake it with everything you publish.
There's no need for blockchains or any fancy nonsense like that. It might help but it's a bit of a barrier to taking this into use.
This is the real play IMO. With the push for identity systems that support attestation [1], it doesn't matter if AI is successful at producing high quality results or if it only ever produces massive amounts of pure garbage.
In the latter case, it's a huge win for platform owners like Apple, Google, or Microsoft (via TPM) because they're the ones that can attest to you being "not a bot". I wouldn't be surprised if 5 years from now you need a relationship with one of those 3 companies to participate online in any meaningful way.
So, even if AI "fails", they'll keep pushing it because it's going to allow them to shift a large portion of internet users to a subscription model for identity and attestation. If you don't pay, your content won't ever get surfaced because the default will be to assume it's generated trash.
On the business side we could see schemes that make old-school SSL and code signing systems look like charities. Imagine something like BIMI [2], but for all content you publish, with a pay-per-something scheme. There could even be price discrimination in those systems (similar to OV, EV SSL) where the more you pay the more "trustworthy" you are.
My fear is that eventually you'll start seeing government services where identity and auth are handed off to private companies like Google and Apple. Imagine having your real identity tied to an attestation by one of those companies.
1. https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/#sctn-defined-attestation-for...
My country (the UK) is one of the worst right now, with the current government on a crusade to make the internet 'safer' by adding checkpoints[1] at various stage to tie your internet usage to your real-world identity. Unlike some other technically advanced countries, though, the UK doesn't have the constitutional robustness to ensure civil liberties under such a regime, nor does the population have what I like to think of as the 'continental temperament' to complain about it.
I'd like to make a shout-out to a project in which I participate: the Verifiable Credentials Working Group[2] at the World Wide Web Consortium is the steward of a standard for 'Self-Sovereign Identity' (SSI). This won't be able to fix all the issues with authenticity online, but it will at least provide a way of vouching for others without disclosing personal information. It's a bit like the GPG/PGP 'Web of Trust' idea, but with more sophisticated cryptography such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-online-safety-bill-...
One enticing alternative (for the government!) is to require you to upload your actual documents and use some government sanctioned attestation service.
In theory. in practice there are 3 competing online ID systems within the Spanish government, which is pretty typical beaurocratic bullshit
a general taste for dysfunctional public-private partnerships and the fact that auth is a seriously hard problem at scale, make this scenario a few percentage points more likely than anyone should feel comfortable with.
Funny.
Has it ever been anything else?
Don't feel sorry for people that has no ability to be authentic. They try to hard.
Don't try.
They do.
So…the current system?
My impression of Flat Earthers, is that a lot of them are indeed authentic.
We have found a way to mathematically determine the veracity of Internet information and have developed a fundamentally new algorithm that does not require the use of cryptographic certificates of states and corporations, voting tokens that can bribe any user, or artificial intelligence algorithms that are not able to understand the exact meaning of what a person said. The algorithm does not require external administration, review by experts or special content curators. We have neither semantics nor linguistics — all these approaches have not justified themselves. We have found a unique and very unusual combination of mathematics, psychology and game theory and have developed a purely mathematical international multilingual correlation algorithm that uses graph theory and allows us to get a deeper scientometric assessment of the accuracy and reliability of information sources compared to the PageRank algorithm or the Hirsch index. The algorithm allows betting on different versions of events with automatic determination of the winner and allows to create a holistic structural and motivational frame in which users and news agencies can earn money by publishing reliable information, and a high reputation rating becomes a fundamentally new social elevator.
CyberPravda mathematically evaluates the balance of arguments used by different authors to confirm or refute various contradictory facts to assess their credibility, in terms of consensus in large international and socially diverse groups. From these facts, the authors construct their personal descriptions of the picture of events, for the veracity of which they are held responsible by their personal reputations. An unbiased and objective purely mathematical correlation algorithm based on graph theory checks these narratives for mutual correspondence and coherence according to the principle of "all with all" and finds the most reliable sequences of facts that describe different versions of events. Different versions compete with each other in terms of the value of the flow of meaning, and the most reliable versions become arguments in the chain of events for facts of higher or lower level, which loops the chain of mutual interaction of arguments and counterarguments and creates a global hypergraph of knowledge, in which the greatest flow of meaning flows through stable chains of consistent scientific knowledge that best meet the principle of falsifiability and Popper's criterion. A critical path in the sequence of the most credible facts forms an automatically generated multi-lingual article for each of the existing versions of events, which is dynamically rearranged according to new incoming evidences and the desired credibility levels set by readers in their personal settings ranging from zero to 100%. As a result, users have access to multiple Wikipedia-like articles describing competing versions of events, ranked by objectivity according to their desired level of credibility.
This isn't a panacea either given that it's been chock-ful of astroturfed content for the last few years, but older threads from when Reddit was less popular and manipulatable or threads from small communities are usually good bets.
It does make troubleshooting officially impossible, can't tell people its the 3rd link on this specific query in google.
indeed, and the fact they don't tell you many things like... common ethics would require to, makes the whole service even more... despicable.
Kagi got it first try using the class name. Paid search is the way, ad incentives are at odds with search. Made Kagi my address bar default search and it's been great.
Lack of history is a pro or a con or both depending on personal preference.
I hate the way we ruin everything.
2) ... But that's because the incentives of ads (and affiliate programs, which are also just advertising) cause that to be the case.
(And of course ad-supported search is also doomed to "enshittification", for reasons that Google explained back at the beginning, then years later ignored to make Line Go Up—so yes, paid is the only kind that can be good, now, and yes, that's because of ad-tech, on multiple fronts)
Turns out, he was right!
For most people, the alternative to browsing most of what they look at on, say, their phone day-to-day, if it vanished, isn't to pay for more content (maybe a little... but mostly it won't be the same content) but to, IDK, play the Nokia Snake Game. The value is nearly nonexistent, for most visitors.
What I meant, was that Scott McCloud was right, in the sense that ad supported content had some serious problems.
Example of alternative for micro-payment model: You pay $20 to an intermediary each month. You upvote web pages/domains. Pages you visit knows you pay $20 each month but not whether you upvote them. At the end of the month, the $20 gets equal split between web pages you upvoted.
It's a very imperfect model that probably wouldn't get spontaneously adopted. But there's many ways it could be varied. And saying it won't work feels a bit too categorical because are we really saying no possible variant of this will ever work?
In a field of thousands of interchangeably-identical but pretty poppies, would you pay a tenth of a penny to have one more poppy out there? How about a hundredth of a penny? No, it'd be of so little value to you that even a split-second of time spent contemplating the question vastly exceeds its value. The trouble is that most browsing isn't discriminating—acceptable alternatives include almost anything else (as in my Nokia Snake Game example—it's just killing time, and some options might be preferable to others but the difference is extremely tiny).
The only way it could work is if you somehow got almost the entire Web to opt in and start blocking non-micropaying users, such that very little at all was browsable on the Web without going through the trouble of setting this up and it was basically just a second ISP bill. I don't think that's possible unless a full ban on Web advertising were to happen, not just on spying ad-clearinghouses, but also on traditional ads. Then... maybe, but I still wouldn't bet on it working out.
Paid content does work, but it has to aim at addressing the small slice of the audience for whom your content is worth a lot more than a micropayment and getting whole dollars out of them, not pennies or fractions of pennies.
The only place anything like micropayments has kinda worked over a whole medium-category is music. What does that look like?
1) There's a clear legal framework and licensing scheme around music that is broadly adhered-to, and existing, well-established organizations to deal with to get it all sorted out.
2) There's little exclusivity of content, which lets competition at service quality & convenience take center stage and keeps competitors on their toes (very unlike video streaming...)
3) People do care to have access to particular content. They care a lot, when it comes to music, and indeed, many spend much of their time listening to the same songs, albums, and artists over an over. They do not find a random playlist of free music from Soundcloud or whatever to be at all an acceptable replacement, even if it's all in genres they like.
4) ... and yet, this scheme sees constant criticism of not making any notable money for all but the very, very top of the pile. It's not a significant income stream for the vast majority of artists, even those who do make a living at music. Their income still has to be made up elsewhere (remember that "small slice of your audience to whom your work is way more valuable than micropayments"?) And this is the closest thing we have to a working example of micropayments, and it is in fact a functioning micropayment market of sorts. It still, arguably, isn't very good.
Google needs an LLM because they have a business need to answer the question for you, thus keeping you on Google.
To wit, the few queries I've thrown at !fast were pretty inaccurate.
Google was a breath of fresh air.
Now Google is used for strategic shots - you are interested in one piece of information, you find it, and you quickly retreat to your safe havens.
And there were services like Hotline!
And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!
Well….
Before modems, we used to drive to peoples houses and literally swap floppy disks of software and files!
There would be meetups.
I was just a kid, but my Dad used to network with other computer owning parents and friends!
So Sneaker Net essentially.
We’d go to computer shows too!
Ad blockers are one such tool.
AI powered answer extraction tools are the next one. That can filter out all the product placement noise for you while you are browsing.
Algorithm feed aggregators that can consume algorithm feeds and filter them to get rid of garbage and things that trigger you in negative ways to invoke engagement.
People pick convenience above almost everything else unfortunately, a few may prefer the old world but a vast majority of people will use Google and whatever its successor is.
People buy brands because they don't want to figure out what's good or bad. Brands tend to gain a reputation by being good.
The same is true for websites. People will trust specific websites when they seek information, and those websites will get passed around.
Humans get tired.
A good deal of humans care about the truth. Some of them actively seek to deceive and avoid the truth -- liars, we tend to dislike them. But the ones both sides dislike are the ones who disregard the truth... ie: bullshitters -- the, "that's just your opinion, man," the, "what even is the truth anyway?" people.
While I'm aware of the criticisms of Frankfurt's definition of bullshit [0], I think a useful part of it is the idea that there are folks who don't even care what the truth is. This seems to be the intended purpose of generative AI; ie: hallucinations exist by design and cannot be removed without recognizing that the approach needs to change.
I think that's what gets people like the author to write criticisms like this. We detest bullshit in a number of critical areas such as information retrieval and search.
If you welcomed a giant robot in your house that produces 100x as much shit as a human, you don't have the infrastructure to deal with it.
It was never an issue of yes or no, it's an issue of how much.
Consider: TimeCube.
Created by a human? It's nonsense, but... it's fascinating. Engaging. Memorable. Thought-provoking (in a meta kind of way, at any rate). I dare say, worthy of preservation.
If TimeCube didn't exist, and an AI generated the exact same site today? Boring. Not worth more than a glance. Disposable. But why? It's the same!
------
Right or wrong, we value communication more when there's a human connection on the other side—when there's a mind on the other side to pick at, between the lines of what's explicitly communicated, and continuity for ongoing or repeated communication that could reveal more of what's behind the veil. There's another level of understanding we feel like we can achieve, when a human communicates, and expectation, an anticipation of more, of enticing mystery, of a mind that may reflect back on our own in ways that we find enlightening, revealing, or simply to grant positive familiar-feeling and a sense of belonging.
What's remarkable is this remains true even when the content of the communication is rather shit. Like TimeCube.
All of that is lost when an LLM generates text. I think that's also why we feel deceived by LLM use when it masquerades as human, even if what's communicated is identical: it's because we go looking for that other level of communication, and if that's not there, giving the impression it might be really is misleading.
This may change, I suppose, if "AI" develops rather a lot farther than it is now and we begin to feel like we're getting a window into a true other when it generates output, but right now, it's plainly far away from that.
Google will start dealing with this problem when it starts appearing in their budget in big enough numbers. The tech layoffs we're hearing about from one company after another - google is mentioned in another HN thread today - may be a sign of which way the wind is blowing.
You seem to have a hilariously over generous opinion of ad tech spending. The biggest players are already doing this themselves.
And today, right now, they're all still hiring.
Google might notice but has no incentive to spend money to stop it because they're not the ones the humans stopped paying. The companies that advertise with Google might notice a drop in ROI on their ads, but it will be a while before they abandon Google because most of them don't see any other option.
I dread what the internet will look like if we wait for this this to hit Google's bottom line.
It only becomes a problem when it results in a collapse of trust; when people have been burned by too many bad products and decide to no longer trust the sites or search results which they used to. Due to my job, I get a lot of ads for gray market drugs on Instagram. I know, however, that all of these are not tested by the FDA and most are either snake oil or research chemicals masquerading as Amanita Muscaria or Delta-8 THC, and so I ignore these ads.
There's categories of products where I spend money regularly, but I go directly to category-specific sites so google again loses out on the ability to take their cut as middleman, which I'd happily let them take - and maybe discover vendors other than the ones I know - if they provided me with higher-quality results than they do now.
Google is still working for most areas, but where it's really good is the ads for products. If there's something you want to buy, Googles ads engine will find it for you, you just have to know exactly what you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
“Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost
useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright
misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses
were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever
plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put
crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their
products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole
purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good
crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random
letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written
document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and
one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At
first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by
taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for
another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got
interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you
mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the
Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous
sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa
has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial
sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind.
The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that
lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
I like "Artificial Inanity" as a description of LLMs
https://ymlibrary.com/download/Topics/Self/Work-School/Work-...
Unfortunately I have to imagine this is only going to lead to more closed communities and less free sharing of knowledge.
Maybe I'm cynic, but a completely walled-off / paid internet doesn't seem too unrealistic. You'll have to pay a subscription to every website you want to visit.
On one side you have the open internet wasteland, filled to the brim with AI bots / generated content, essentially trying to vacuum pennies off human visitors. On the other hand you have the walled internet, where you have to pay for stuff and jump through flaming hoops to prove that you're a human.
I won't pretend to be able to look into the future with any kind of certainty, even if the scope is only a couple of years, but it wouldn't surprise me if we have created a way to make the dead internet theory real.
Having interacted with some bots, it def feels like we've gone from the stone age, to the sci-fi future, in only a couple of years.
It’s my prediction that a ChatGPG supercharged with a GAN is going to be the most valuable iteration of text generation technology. Granted, it will still likely be off a little but it’s going to get harder and harder to tell the difference.
I'm wondering if there's a genuine opportunity here to go further. A client-side browser plug-in, plus a SaaS which automatically vets pages on-the-fly to guesstimate the chance they're AI-generated, spammy, etc. So if you visit a new domain the plug-in auto-updates the white-list, prompting you to confirm the judgement, maybe prompting to add the domain to UB0 or similar.
Again, this could all be done entirely client-side if the guesstimation algorithm is efficient enough. But a centralised database would confer other obvious advantages, like basing the guesstimation score on decisions from similar users, building a giant up-to-date list with fast lookup, that sort of thing. Site listings and other data from Kagi, marginalia.nu and Mwmble.com would be a great starting place. Obviously it would have to protect against the system being gamed, Sybil attacks and what have you.
I'd pay a dozen CURRENCY per year for that.
Maybe this exists already, or something similar?
the problem is that would create another SEO like arms race. If it takes off everyone will be working 24x7 to defeat the vetting process and gain entry to the walled garden just like they did to gain entry to the first page of Google search results.
How do we keep the internet useful to humans while this is going on?
Maybe this is the new search engine challenge. Google rose to the top because, at the time, they were able to mine the links' references to each other to determine which were the best sites. If a search engine can solve the problem of finding the best (realest?) information in this mess, then they can rise to the top.
"So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity".
The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day."
A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.
The last part of the conclusion to this article is true: people who put shitty content on the Internet don't care, and are only interested in ad revenue. (Incidentally that's why advertising is bad: it gives the wrong incentives. It's possible that ad blockers will save the Internet.)
But the first part isn't true: Google is still useful, especially when used as it was first meant to be used. Google started as a search engine, meaning: a tool to find documents in a corpus. It wasn't an oracle, and still isn't, despite how much it wants to be, or users want it to be.
Search for documents, go read them, evaluate if what they say seems to make sense and who wrote them, try to do a comparison between different sources to see where they converge and where they diverge, and then draw your own conclusions.
> If that means the rest of us get information about inflamed penises when we’re trying to know how long sinus inflammation is supposed to last, well, I guess we’re shit out of luck.
If you can't be bothered to know the difference between a sinus and a penis then sorry, not sorry.
LLMs weren't even around a couple of years ago in any meaningful way and the internet was still full of dogshit. Maybe we can have better dogshit made with AI.
What I’m not sure is whether it’s ai generated, bad quality traditional bot generated, or human content spam generated.
But whatever it is, it fooled google. It hurts to read, each numbered point is similar to this: “S.F. city parks are a great and amazing place to fly. Sf parks are illegal to fly in”
Post link: https://www.kentfaith.com/blog/article_where-can-you-fly-dro...
All of googles' top suggestions, highlights, and whatever other garbage they put in the top two scroll pages, is just junk. Garbage. It's right perhaps 5% of the time for me.
So not only do I have to hunt through their horrible search results, I have to hunt through junk they add on top of that.
The sad part is, their buffoonery in aliasing words is 90% of the problem. No, I searched for David, not Dave. No, I searched for Debian, not Ubuntu. On and on, unless I use verbatim, I get nothing even remotely useful.
It's like Google is completely disconnected from the real world. I bet they don't even dogfood. They probably have a Google Employee search that actually works, and doesn't alias or something.
I wonder what startling revelations Google would have, if they flew to the middle of Missouri, told people how to use verbatim, and then saw the wondrous expressions of "oh, it works now?" in grandmas.
They blew the AI game, screwing around, messing about, giving up a decade lead on OpenAI. They're destroying their search engine, their brand, with this junky, modern lack of effort. They're making gmail less and less friendly, losing cherished photos of loved ones in Google Drive, their entire Pii based income stream is coming to an end, frankly, Google is done, unless they do something dramatic.
They're on the path to becoming IBM. A washed up has been, ruminating on past glories.
They should be hiring right now. Massive amounts of talent is being set free, they should scoop them up, and reap 5 year research and dev rewards. They have the excess capital... now, something they will lose soon.
But no. Onward, we march into oblivious irrelevance, says they! Yay!
It's not (mainly) Google. It's that SEO won.
Poppycock. SEO was a thing 25 years ago. It's the same now, as it was then, it's merely that Google has vastly reduced efforts to maintain their product.
It's not that SEO won, it's that Google doesn't care.
One way they don't care, is apparent with their ridiculous query aliasing, and spewing pages of random junk before you can even scroll down to actual search results.
Google is a has been, focusing on short term profits. They deserve to go EOL.
SEO is the same as it was 25 years ago? Do you remember anything resembling modern content mills in 1999? It always kept on evolving, and there's vastly more money dumped into it today than the 90s could ever dream of. Algorithmically generating content became easier and it got more "believable" to a search engine bot.
Again, putting useless search results at the top doesn't benefit Google in any way, not even the short-term profits. It's the telltale sign of SEO garbage because they have an incentive to game the system, while Google has no incentive to make the system less useful. They likely made some bad choices along the way, but 80% of my issues with Google are outside actors trying to make it useless.
Well, they should have incentives, it's called user retention. And they are so very complacent, it's hilarious. Here we have, one of the most dramatic shifts in search engine technology in decades, as AI iterates crazy fast, and they're sitting on their past achievements, and hoping user stickiness wins.
Look at how fast Firefox went from the dominant browser to barely existent. Things can shift in the blink of an eye.
Today, more than anything, Google needs to be at the top of its game. Bing is fast becoming far far better than Google Search, and they can pull in crazy user numbers if they wish.
Microsoft has a big bag of cash, and could pay Firefox, Apple, and a dozen other competitors when they deem strike time is a go.
Google, comparatively, seems in a decadent daze of debilitating dormant dreams, damned to derlictness.
In retrospect it'll be obvious why Google wont be relevant at all in 15 years.
The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon… — Sports Illustrated (@SInow)
Oh. So you constructed your site to make this distinction unclear, and then paid for an AI generated article to be put on your site.
I guess that makes it alright then. Nothing needs to change.
Then by running an ad blocker I'm doing my part to make the world better.
But personally, I'm pretty happy about the internet filling up with dogshit, if only because I think it's likely that it will foil the plans of SV, singularitarians, etc.
Eventually, people will not know the difference between an AI "hallucination" and factual information. This becomes a serious problem when you consider that there's already an existing cohort of people who blindly trust Google over experienced humans. Case in point: I just saw a video [1] this morning where an air traffic controller argues with an experienced pilot about their approach method, citing "I Googled it" as their authoritative information source.
Your personal Search Engine is your personal model which you evolve to your needs. Safely including with your history, your chats, your family's memory. Internet then exists only as technical means to reach big corpo nets (heavily guarded against anyone extracting info from them) and as a ring of guerilla websites or fediverses, which are open by nature and resemble the old internet.
It is really to my opinion that this happens earlier than 2036.
How will AI discover new facts in the real world? What is the AI equivalent of boots-on-the-ground journalism? Of learning by doing?
A lot of reality happens in meatspace, and someone eventually needs to put that information into computers. AI can only rehash what's already there.
My question is who will do that work if you rob them of any satisfaction for doing it? A man running a widget review blogs could get reader mail, online friendships, advertising partnerships, a sense of making his mark. If everything a person creates just feeds an AI, what do they get in return?
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/funsearch-making-new-d...
What would be a strong selling point would be if the LLM is able to reliably cite where the information comes from. MS’s copilot currently attempts to do this, but often cites low-quality websites with questionable reliability.
Gram and Gramp are going to get their keys phished. An LLM screed signed by Gramps stolen key isn't authentic even though it 100% mathematically is. Authenticity is about the mindset and intentions of the creator.
EDIT: Also, the odds are close to 100%.
See Elon Musk about 4-5 years ago. It was impossible to criticize the man or his projects without getting dogpiled.
Human behavior is incredibly interesting at times.
I wouldn't go forward with it because it felt unethical, but it was a really fascinating thought experiment.
To me this came when I realised that SEO this and SEO that SEO here and SEO there was as innate as googling for answers. And is still incomprehensible to me how people can argue with serious face for actively and forcefully distorting the search results that they so eagerly want to build their goodwill on top of.
Machines only taking over the killing of the internet search with incredible efficiency.
Google: WARNING: It is a common misconception that the phrase “tie me over” is actually pronounced “tide me over.” Some even go so far as to say the “tide” refers to the ebb and flow of hunger, but this is not the case. Rest assured “tie me over” is correct.
Actual source: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tie-me-over-vs-tid...
> “Tied over” is a misspelling of “tide over.” Tied means to attach, fasten, or bind something, while a tide is the rising and falling of the sea that takes place twice a day in relation to the pull of the moon's gravity.
So, it did come up with a correct answer... but the answer is to a completely different question. Though the "actual source" you used was the second result.
Perhaps you are internet aristocracy advocating “Google for thee and arXiv.org for me” . Are the folks writing our peer reviewed studies in an air-gapped compound in the amazon?
You can’t put the sewer next to the water supply and expect the two not to mix together.
You can in digital communication because we have cryptography. That's the reason we can have secure https traffic over a really insecure web. The future is probably that almost everything authentic is going to be signed and everything else we'll just assume comes from a bot.
We're optimizing ourselves to death.
This network of real human knowledge provides a way to introduce new, clean, human-generated datasets into LLM training in a validity-conscious manner, and makes it possible to avoid model collapse and reduce unwanted errors in creating new and better generations of generative models. And we have a practical solution to avoid the collapse of large language models — we create a global unbiased decentralized CyberPravda (dot) com platform for disputes, for analyzing the reliability of information and assessing the reputation of its authors, where people are accountable with personal reputation for their knowledge and arguments.
But the examples given are... google search results and articles from big publishers, things made to cast a wide net. Those were never good ways to communicate with other people online imo. If you want to interact with real people look for smaller communities and individual creators.
We have had some AI generated PRs and issues. These are incredibly easy to spot for me, I'll get into how in a second, but its been a matter of taking them half-seriously just in case. When asked about their decisions, they either post an obvious AI answer, or garbage, abd you can reject the contribution.
There are two parts to this:
1. why is this a problem? cant you just take it at face value? Well, the point at which I'll accept an AI generated PR is when I cannot tell. This has always been the goalpost for me -- if the contribution is good and was made by the person contributing, it gets approved. If not, then not. AI counts as "didnt write it yourself", because I want to be able to ask you later whx something related broke, when your chatgpt chat is already closed. You need to understand the code you post.
2. How do you spot them?
Usually what these AI tools, and people using them, do, is change unrelated code. Rewording a comment in the same or even different file, or simply reordering stuff for no reason. Another obvious sign is the solution itself. If it doesnt compile, or doesn't even look like the right language (e.g. C when the codebase is C++), thats a sign as well. Use of libraries that arent there, or even a PR body filled with text.
Real people are lazy. Real people tend to get the job done and gtfo, and not blabber on about whatever in their PR. Real people like me also wont merge anything that wastes my time, like AI garbage.
“The internet is broken in a fundamental way”? No, there are some growing pains at the margins. Feel free to react strongly, but these are not the same.
However, I don't think we've reached the end of the world yet, because if you just have the patience to learn what the reliable sources are, and the wherewithal to pay for a few of them, then you can ignore most of the junk, just as you can mostly ignore social media.
Also, y'know, books. Physical books. Public and university libraries. Yes some books age poorly or don't deserve to be published, but consider how many more checks most books go through before they end up on a shelf, including curation by librarians.
LLMs don't talk to each other - humans use LLMs to talk to other humans
The sinus example scares me. It's obviously wrong. But what about all the subtle errors that will be generated?
Humanity's knowledge is bootstrapped from BS. But most of it is long forgotten. On the internet, the BS ends up in the training data of the next iteration. I guess curation of quality text corpora will be an important thing in the next years.
“Truth” in the most practical sense is whatever most people believe and espouse.
Sure we’re all more sophisticated and intelligent to believe the actual truth, but do you have the willpower to fight that battle every day?
You espouse this like a rule but it just isn't so. Nazi Germany believed themselves to be the righteous rulers of the earth, descended from Ubermen that never existed, commanding more powerful armies than anything, and were allowed to live that delusion right up until the democratic world forced them to reckon with reality. You can avoid that reckoning for arbitrary lengths of time.
It's no different to "the market will remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It's the same rule. Reality can be avoided for as long as you want if you don't have infinite ambition.
With AI, the cost of blogspam becomes so low, and 'hallucinations' driving trust trust even lower, that it makes sense to slowly withdraw from the clearweb entirely and stick to a list of official sources and 5 or so trusted 3d party sources.
Modern top-flight LLMs are hitting to within 10 or 20% of Google at the very start.
Google in like 2001 or whatever was fucking magic: vast official data had been put on the “information superhighway”, the non-POSIX-spec stuff was people cool enough to host a website, and spam was, like on AOL or something.
You just got a white page, a box, a button, and the answer.
I suspect that for people under 35 or 40, LLMs feel kinda like Google did.
But the best part was it said to be careful to avoid the seeds when you have a fever because it could cause explosions in your mouth.
It’s gotta be AI right? Who else could be as dumb as dogshit.
See section “how to pick a healthy and…”
What exactly could have been the true translation then?
The blog author is supposedly "Danny Max".
If we had accepted the best internet posts and kicked out the egotistical moderators, and charged $0.01 per post to limit spam, the world would be a better place and we would have a better source from which to train our AIs.
Probably, at the end, looking at the vast information created, AI will enter in a loop when it is always creating the same information or the same obvious patterns over, and over again. If that happen it will be the prove that AI is not creative as humans.
I published each version on a separate WordPress blog covering roughly the same topic, chose random pictures, set random publish dates close to each other, and signed them all up for Google News. This non-AI dogshit dominated a small tech niche, making a decent amount of money at the time for a 14-year-old. I am pretty sure I was not the only one coming up with that idea at the time.
And this was for the German market only. So I am quite sure that it was more common in the US at an earlier time, as they are usually ahead of us.
AI has brought back some of the fun from 2010~ because you can generate non-pre-approved content for fun and profit and have a big community to share it with.
<Player> set a new record last night
And when you go to click into it?
An AI created post about how the athlete in question is now in position 1258 all time at something or other.
Awesome. Such a great use of technology. Yet this will be the primary use of AI outside of materials research. Making clickbait clickbaitier.
Automation can now shove even further content to search engines and keep lowering the quality further.
I think that websites as we knew and searched for them started dying a long time ago, but AI will unavoidably make this whole matter worse.
Teachers have long warned us about using Wikipedia as a source. Fake news has always existed. Real news has been diluting itself with questionably true clickbait for years. The mass scramble by companies to hastily use AI is just further diluting and tainting the standard information outlets we've used.
Xillenial here and the internet was a utopia when I first explored it.
Everyone you interacted with was similarly curious and interesting. All the content was some flavor of passion project.
I’ve recently been getting into ham radio because it has a similar feel to me as the early internet. You need a license and an outlay of equipment and everyone else is a hobbyist also. It’s not an app anyone can use with their thumbs.
I think we’ll see a backlash at some point where people abandon these app-driven spaces and we go back to grass roots communities.
At least I hope so
To some extent is has already happened. I've seen some upswing in niche forum use but nowhere close to the heyday. Sadly, most people seem to move into private chat channels.
Why do a web search to hope to get answers to my question, when I can have an AI write me a custom article that actually answers my question?
Only way to win is not to play.
Internet was always full of spam. Google was able to work around that. Since for some years Internet became dead because Google is not able to keep up.
Internet was dogshit. Now it is just AI dogshit. Google was quite good, but now it is not.
In a few years we will not use Google search, we will ask chatbots for answers. There will be no "link archive", or nobody will be interested at all in looking at them.
Chatbots will be worshiped. Why going to BBC, if chatbot will always 'know better'.
Google will not invest into Google search, as this "program" will die. Killed of.
Journalists will remain. BBC will continue writing stories, which will be created only to feed chat bot monsters.
For example. https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
maybe even further. I subscribed to the physical, printed and delivered, Wall St. journal a few weeks ago, i really really like it. It has a first page and a last page, i can read it and be done. There's no infinite scroll. I also am subscribed (by chance more or less) to a physical magazine that arrives monthly. I really enjoy it too, the magazine isn't an answer to a question I asked so I always run across something unexpected/new there. Also, like the newspaper, it has a last page and there's no engagement bait because it's Read Only.
Oh well.
Maybe as a protest I’ve been hammering on bottom-line-up-front in all of our team communications.
if I use a computer to break a bank can I blame the computer too?
In my experience, there's not far to go!
Ha ha ha! That future is now, the value of the web has declined for me dramatically. I hate looking for information on the web now. First it was troll and content farms, now they have a new sibling to help them enshitify the web further in AI. Apart from a few places I trust I've turned away from the web.
The worst thing is that I spent more of my time researching now and I seldom get any results.
In 2006 a fellow developer showed me a bot he had coded to write blog posts that just "spun" existing articles it scraped from other sites. He was making a fortune from fake blogs full of thousands of reworked articles, so this dogshit has been steaming for a long time.
I use GPT4 and Claude to write drafts of blog posts and wiki articles, often starting by having them summarize 250 page documents. The output is very high quality, adds a lot of value (because many of the original documents cannot be shared) and completes a task that no human could easily do (read thousands of long documents in hours).
So, I can't write AI off -- it is a tool that can be used for good or bad.
The root cause of the problem is content monetization so please let's just stop indexing anything that tries to monetize content and/or track readers.
And I'll say this for all the overly-capitalistic folk on here: the amount of money I'm willing to pay for access to a search engine like this has been going up every month since 2002 -- something that the other paid search engines clearly fail to understand.
But what if the CEO of the service provider needs another $5m bonus? What if the stock needs to go up so that the shareholder gamblers can get more dividend paid? What if all of a sudden the service gets bought out?
The truth is that what you are seeking is more likely to come from someone who is just passionate about it with not that much motivation based on profit. That doesn't mean that this entity or person can't be financially supported but it gets problematic when profit is the _main_ incentive.
For a good example of an interesting search engine built by a single guy, see Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/
As always, the problem is not the tool but the people using the tool. Unfortunately we can't stop them whether they write crap themselves or have AI do it but the latter certainly creates more pollution than ever before.
As long as someone clicks on a "you wouldn't believe this secret Android feature that makes you money!" then this will continue.
Doesn't really matter tho, people have been curating their view of the web via platforms and individual creators/sources for ages now.
HN is absolutely behind the curve about every new piece of tech now.
Just grumpy old boomers ranting about the good old days.
So long. And thanks for the memories
Although nothing like this (or other solutions) is probably gonna materialize. The world, and especially the Internet, is driven by short-term commercial interests, and not-enshittifying things doesn't seem to make enough return on capital.
Perhaps cryptography can be useful but already irl you can buy "hand-made" products but ofc you can not fully trust that something was really hand-made or that web content was made really by human but at the end of the day it all comes down to trust. Web sites and web publishers need to build up trust in order to gain traction among web users and web customers.
The issue with AI is the fully-automatic engines behind the process. It's not that bad web pages are unique in history. What is unique is the sheer volume and velocity of drek that is being and will be produced.
Combatting this will need technology to, in effect, provide a mark of authenticity. "This was created by a human," in effect, and, more specifically, "By this [human|set of humans]." Contrariwise, "This is a product of system X."
Of course, people will lie and claim their AIs didn't ghostwrite their content or create those images. So against authorship and identities there will be an increasing need to rank authority/authenticity/veracity.
Not all AI-generated content will be horrible. And not all human-generated content will be trustworthy. There will need to be a way to mark reliability based on community-oriented standards. For AI-generated content (and human-generated content too) there will need to be ways to cite sources.
This will all become highly politicized, commercialized and gamed.
Yet if we don't work on such standards, we will continue to be beholden to hidden search engine algorithms of trustworthiness. Why did something get to the answerbox or SERP1? Was it simply through keyword packing? Or did whatever author behind this — human or machine — actually know (or at least seem to know) what the hell they are talking about?
There will need to be Internet-wide ways to create community-oriented ratings. Thumbs up and down.
Maybe this is a popular page with the public. But actual professional astronomers see this as factually misleading.
Maybe this page is popular with political faction X. But others point out it is rife with factually incorrect conspiracy theories.
Just like there are now "community notes" on Twitter (X), the whole Internet needs the equivalent way to ascribe qualitative judgments on any arbitrary page.
Exactly; if AI can for example summarize a research paper or a book better than human then it is hell of a more useful than any person could possibly be and that's the point of AI(that it possibly can exhibit super human skills).
Web search engine is a massive data mining and data analytics software solution powered by graph theory and data science algorithms for information retrieval. No search engine can know what information is per se better and no search engine can know what you know and know what you want but it can use graph theory and data science to approximate and show you what it thinks that you want.
This reads more like a rant against Google’s search product.
Yes, Google might go under due to AI (Clayton says, thank you and goodbye) but that doesn’t mean the internet as a whole is doomed.
To be frank, the internet is already awash with dogshit. It’s doing pretty well so far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers
World Wide Web search results outside of walled garden platforms like youtube or facebook (and, really, even within those platforms) have run into a kind of kessler syndrome where the amount of garbage on the web has made it increasingly difficult to get anything done on it. Eventually we may find that we can't trust anything we read on the internet anymore, and abandon the world wide web entirely (opting instead to spend all of our time on proprietary walled garden systems we do trust). Perhaps we will be required to use some form of identification (you driver's license or SSN, as in South Korea) to access such services (unless that can be easily defeated by an AI as well).
I was surprised that, when ChatGPT came out, the immediate concern people had was skynet-tier apocalypse fantasy, in which roving bands of machines walk the earth, searching for humans to exterminate like in BLAME! It shows that the people who work on these AI systems understand their implications about as much as Richard Hammond understood the power of genetic engineering in Jurassic Park. Their entire worldview is painted by Science Fiction. Their understanding of the human race lacks any kind of grounding in reality. They believed that what they had released was the first baby step which could, potentially, result in the downfall of the human race in several decades if we're not careful, but they fell victim to the same "move fast and break things" motto that Facebook did. They didn't consider the immediate destructive power their technology would release because they consider "disruption" to be a fundamentally good thing. Their only concern was avoiding hypothetical possibilities posited by their favorite science fiction authors and not the real eventualities predicted by economists.
I found it much more likely that AI will disrupt systems we rely on, wielded by humans for short term profit motive: ecommerce, news, media, and the labor economy. Malicious actors promoting scam products or yellow journalism, middle managers trying to cut labor cost by replacing easily automated jobs like copywriting with LLMs. I think we are more likely to shoot ourselves in the head with AI in pursuit of a single quarter's earnings report than we are to see Silicon based lifeforms wander the planet looking for carbon based matter to consume
Today the situation is different. LLMs are capable of making content which is only verifiably AI generated with a few tell-tale signs as well as good old fashioned fact-checking. I dread this election year in the US because it will be so so so much easier for Russia or China to spread even more convincing misinformation automatically. They could create armies of bots which hold intense arguments with each other and have every reply seem logically sound.
Jk. Wikipedia is much larger and better as an encyclopedia.
Click on any story, and the comment section is 80% bots. Doesn't mater if it's serious users like NYT, CNN, or whatever.
I've also noticed a huge uptick in spammy pages and groups that pump out AI generated pictures and stories, with nothing but bots upvoting and commenting the content.
These days I only use FB for private hobby groups, and messenger to talk with friends and family.
Today I just use it for FB messenger to keep in contact with my parents. They use the social features and the news media parts as well. Some of my friends from high school post pictures now that they're having kids. I noticed that, in our early 20s, people moved from Facebook to Instagram, but now in our late 20s and early 30s, people post more family oriented content on facebook
> To help understand the next step we can think of this process as follows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants and animals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered a new way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doing this instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led to new replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can ask whether the same thing could happen again and — aha — we can see that it can, and is.
> [...]
> Computers handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variation and selection is still done by human beings, with their biologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement, communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already there are examples of computer programs recombining old texts to create new essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions, and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data. Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, AltaVista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2010/08/te...
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog -- Peter Steiner / The New Yorker, July 5, 1993.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
I mean, it always has been on its lowest layers. The "is this incoming data from the Internet originated by a human being" problem hasn't really been solved, and is probably not truly solveable. It probably wasn't a good idea to train most of the world to use a single private ad-driven service for answers to everything in the first place.
Maybe one day we’ll all be able to “smell” ai generate text easily, but we’re not there yet
mmm, I want some of that allegorical stuff, I like symbols
Talking with people in real life is stressful (for someone like me with social anxiety.)
Rarely do I walk away from an encounter with a random person in “meat space” feeling any better than I did when I walked up to them. And even when I do, I replay the interaction over and over again until I’m sure I didn’t embarrass myself.
Plus, where I live, there is no tech community. It’s just not popular here, but it’s what I’m interested in. (I even tried starting a meet up, but got 0 turnout, then the local startup accelerator closed in 2020)
I only get to talk shop online.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+does+it+take+for+si...